What makes us continue to peer, pressing, as it were, our noses against the glass? Is it the tingle of voyeurism, the license Diane Arbus gives us to scrutinize the odd, the deformed, the repellent? Is it the thrilling opportunity to do precisely what our mothers forbade us? To stare? And what does staring get us but a chance differentiate ourselves from the freakish, all the while sucking as much lurid detail as we can.

If Diane Arbus, a splendid selection of whose work is now on display at KMR Arts in Washington, reminds us of anything, it is that looking is a kind of rape. Look too long and a kind of horror sets in, a queerly intoxicating prurience that reveals as much about the viewer as it does about the viewed.

Even, and perhaps especially, when the abnormal looks so disturbingly normal.

In 1963, when Diane Arbus received the first of her two Guggenheim grants, her goal was to photograph "American rites, manners, and customs." But this was Arbus, after all, who, by 1963 was setting the art world aflame with her portraits of the marginalized, diseased and deviant.

Susan Sontag wrote that Arbus photographed ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive,'' from a vantage point ''based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.'' Sontag was referring largely to Arbus' most spectacularly bizarre work, images of dwarves and transvestites, the demented and the freakish. Was Arbus exploiting the marginalized or empathizing with them? As her work progressed into the early 1970s, when she began photographing those afflicted by Down Syndrome, the lines began to blur, the defense of empathy too difficult to justify. "I think it does hurt, a little, to be photographed," she said once.

What's compelling about many of the images from this relatively early part of her career is how shatteringly familiar, even homey, the subjects become. That includes those from a New Jersey nudist camp. Arbus' genius was in turning the familiar exotic and the exotic, familiar. "If you scrutinize reality closely enough," she said, "it becomes fantastic."

So, sure, the image of the retired man and his wife at home in a New Jersey nudist camp is unsettling because they are sitting in positions associated with listening to the evening news, while wearing nothing but flip-flops and slippers.

And, yes, the folds of flab and sagging body parts are in stark contradiction to the one piece of art that hangs on the otherwise bare walls a Betty Page-like girly image.

But it's the nonchalance of the setting and the horrible familiarity of the living room with its rock maple furniture and Kleenex box open on the on the console TV, that make this image so disturbing. Arbus has divorced the erotic from the nude into something between the mundane and the grotesque. Here, the bizarre is not nudity, but nakedness, stark, unalloyed and embarrassing. Arbus has suburbanized the erotic, demystified it and made it, if not completely ordinary, then benignly familiar.

The odd, in Arbus' vision, live among us and sometimes are us, as she demonstrates in one of her more incriminating works, a Christmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. Here is an early 1960s living room we all recognize from the fringed sateen sofa, to the plastic-encased lampshade, to the assortment of plastic fruit on the occasional table. Stuffed into a corner is a Christmas-tree, so suffocated with tinsel that it is difficult to make out any pine needles.

What takes up most of the space in this hypnotic image is the enormous swath of carpeting at its center that hints at the emptiness that is at this celebration's heart. And this is the part that is most disquieting about Arbus, who grew up in a privileged household of furriers on Central Park West.

In all of the blunt starkness of her work, there is an element of derision. The Levittown living room is almost vulgar in its soullessness, just as her patriotic young man with a flag is revolting, with his pimply stubble and chipped teeth. Is the man mentally disturbed, or is he just ugly, and does patriotism worsen the effect?

Similarly, in Arbus' image of a teenage couple on Hudson Street in New York, it is hard not to sense a level of scorn. Here is a teenager in wingtips and a trench coat, hair upswept in a greasy pompadour, with his arm tightly clutching a teenage girl. The object of his affections, smiling coyly under an unkempt bouffant, wears a print dress and heavy overcoat. He is doing his best Don Draper, she her best Jackie Kennedy. Both fail awkwardly and Arbus exploits that bungling pretense to artistic effect. Is this empathy or ridicule?

What makes Arbus so extraordinary is that often it is both in the same image. A photograph of a baby crying, its mucus hardening in flaring nostrils, upends convention. Instead of sympathy, the image evokes revulsion. Alternately, a depiction of a pair of female impersonators is balletic and sensitive, the silky blacks of the background giving an added tenderness to the piece. The nudist family posed anomalously on a scabby, rock-strewn field, their poses more beach-like than outdoorsy, look plainly ridiculous, as if a titillating fad has been taken up by just the wrong sort of people.

Of course, it is a measure of the comfort that Arbus achieved with her subjects that allowed her to get these images at all. That speaks boldly of Arbus' intention to photograph the otherwise neglected and spurned. Whatever the result of Arbus' scrutiny of American mores, she clearly knew what she was after.

Editor's note: KMR Arts did not provide photographs to accompany this story.

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